Thursday, March 14, 2013

A Working Mom's Holiday

Truth Thursday

Passover is around the corner. Seders, which are one of my
favorite Jewish traditions, are filled with delicious, ritual foods, the
preparation of which requires days (and days) of cooking, baking and freezing.

But there’s more to Passover than just the seder. There’s
the ritual spring cleaning of the house. In a traditional Jewish home, one is
required to remove every single crumb of bread from every corner of the house,
so much so that you are supposed to use a feather the night before the holiday
to check the corners for crumbs.

There’s also the changing of the dishes. A kosher home
requires not only separate dishes for meat and dairy meals, but a whole
separate set of meat and dairy dishes that taken out only for Passover.

Then there’s the food shopping – since people who observe
Passover cannot eat any leavened product for the entire eight days of the
holiday, special Passover foods must be purchased. To shop in a kosher market
the week before Passover is taking your life in your hands.

And of course, there’s still laundry to do, homework to
oversee, sports to attend, dishes to wash, lunches to prepare and everyday life
to attend to.

Thanksgiving requires a lot of food preparation, but at
least you get a long weekend to enjoy.

Passover sometimes happens during spring break, which isn’t
always a parents’ spring break, and oftentimes happens during a regular week.
No special time off.

I’ve been thinking about the requirements of our holiday
system for working moms. We have been talking a lot lately about flex time
issues, working at home and the need to have work places that accommodate
work/life balance.

But the holiday question doesn’t get a lot of air time.
Honestly, it’s mostly mothers who spend the time, energy, and money to make the
holidays a special time in their homes. And they’re often doing it while working
full-time jobs and managing households at the same time. The traditions of the holidays, ancient as well as more contemporary, were created in a different framework, one in which women's entire job was to take care of the home, holidays included. Today, holiday cheer is created in between emails, management meetings and work travel.

I don’t want to be a spoil sport, and I don’t want to be
qvetchy. But it’s hard to love a holiday that requires so much preparation in
the house when you’re working outside of it 40 hours or more a week.

I don’t have the answer, especially not this year, the first
in over a decade in which I am not working more in the home than outside the
home. I am already hyperventilating
about what needs to be done for Passover, and it’s a whole lot more than buying
the 5-box special matzah package.

I guess my strategy for this year is to try to be as easy
going as possible. Cleaning out the food drawers? Running of the bulls at the
kosher mart? Creating a multi-course meal with traditional foods and no wheat?
I’m just going to have to take a deep breath and get it done, and not expect it to be perfect.

And after my matzah days are over, at least my reward is that Easter Peeps
will be half off at CVS.